Solutions to improve the reliability and applicability of life cycle assessment in industries

Since its first applications in the late 1970, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology has increasingly spread as an effective environmental management tool and has nowadays become a well-established analytical method to quantify the environmental impacts of products and processes at industrial level. Despite its popularity and codification by organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization, the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry and harmonization initiatives promoted at European level (i.e. by the European Platform on LCA) through the publication of the ILCD Handbook, LCA methodology is still under development and there are a lot of open research issues which are widely discussed in literature. Considering the increasing number of applications at industrial level, LCA is recognized not only as a field of scientific research but also a business of growing importance, whose successful development requires both influx of new ideas and harmonized methodologies and reliable and credible applications. The primary needs of industries on LCA rely on the definition of tools for increasing the reliability of LCA results and solutions for enhancing the applicability of the methodology. The present research mainly focuses on how to translate into practice these two aspects, with the aim of providing practical solutions for improving the reliability of the methodology and facilitate its application at industrial level. The methodology applied is based on the conduction of multiple case studies, analyzing different sectors, both at product (tissue paper, milk packaging, wooden pallet) and process level (agricultural processes, wastewater treatment). Furthermore, the main applications of LCA methodology within the private sector are considered: comparison between different solutions, improvement of environmental performances and design of new products. The aspect of how to increase the reliability of LCA results is addressed in the first part of the work, including the first three chapters. The starting point is that both the credibility and transparency of an LCA study can be enhanced by giving more attention to quantifying uncertainties. Uncertainties considered in the present work are connected with parameter uncertainty (connected with data variability) and scenario uncertainty (connected with subjective choices). Therefore the role of the two techniques identified by the ISO 14040 standards to analyze uncertainties during the interpretation phase of LCA, i.e. uncertainty analysis and sensitivity analysis, is discussed. The second part of the work deals with the definition of simplified tools tailored to users’ requirements in order to increase the applicability of the LCA methodology. Streamlined tools are mainly connected with the definition of approaches to simplify the Life Cycle Inventory phase, which is the most time and resource demanding phase of an LCA study. Especially for small- and medium-size enterprises that rarely have the knowledge and resources necessary to implement LCA, a priority is indeed to facilitate the access to reliable, accurate, and relevant life cycle information, reducing efforts connected with data acquisition